Warm encounter (II)

When I opened my eyes, I found myself lying on my bed back in my room; after a long time submerged in that colorless world, seeing such colorful objects brought me some comfort. Especially my blue pillow, my yellow walls, my light blue bed sheet, and the dark dawn-filled comforter.

The nightmare is finally over. Phew, Mom is faster than I thought; to think she carried me from underground back to the surface in the time I fell asleep… This feels nice.

The television, as usual, was left on; I wasn't even looking at it anymore; the sound simply kept me company in that empty house since lately my uncle wasn't visiting us anymore, and I didn't want to get anywhere near that sauna my father calls a workplace.

"Lucy!"

The voice of my dad was calling to me. He seemed pissed at me, yet I couldn't be happier to hear his grumpy voice nagging at me about the stupidest things, such as leaving my toys on the ground or maybe even leaving my bed undone, so I bolted out of the room and headed straight towards the small workshop he owned.

Dad, you have no idea what I went through; there were demons and weird places.

It was a small building located somewhere far behind our house, sitting a little outside the fence that marked the end of our lawn.

The moment I opened the door, I was suddenly blasted with a wave of steaming hot air, and there he was at work, putting the strangely colored liquid into a square mold. The stench was so strong it immediately overwhelmed my nose and made me gag.

As usual, he was putting the strange purple liquid into the mold after having worked on it all day, then closed the metal mold and threw it inside the gigantic furnace he built. After making the liquid evaporate, he would need to treat the remaining powder to turn it into ashen.

"Dad?"

I immediately went in for a hug, but he vanished the moment I wrapped my arms around his waist. Instead of him, many bloody hands appeared, holding me down and digging their nails into my body.

"It's all your fault!" A familiar voice shouted as another hand appeared in front of my face to push me down and plunge my body into pure darkness.

No, it wasn't my fault! You kidnapped me! I didn't do anything wrong.

No matter how much I tried to regain the reins over my dream, I couldn't keep that image of those demons out of my head, the large, towering spider killing and absorbing the body of anyone he came across while the other demon was laughing maniacally, sitting on his back.

I landed on a mountain of corpses; each one of them was crying tears of blood, desperately crawling over each other to get to me, grabbing me, and demanding an answer out of me.

"Why did you kill my family?"

"What did my girlfriend have to do to deserve this?"

"Murderer!"

"I didn't mean for this to happen! I didn't know something like this would've happened!" I shouted back while kicking a couple of those crawling corpses away.

The moment I kicked their hands away, they came crawling with increasing ferocity, slowly dragging me under the huge pile of bodies. Trying to choke me with their rotting hands, trying to gouge my eyes, and trying to rip my body to shreds using their hands alone.

Before they could rip my head out of my body, I woke up screaming in pain and fear.

Next to me was the doctor with a syringe in his right hand. He had tied my body to the bed during my sleep and was using his whole body to pin my left arm against the bed to keep it stable.

"Sweet dreams!" He said, before injecting the strange liquid into my veins.

"No! Wait! I don't want to go back to sleep!"

What are you doing?

I desperately kept wiggling around, trying to free myself and stop him from putting me to sleep with that mysterious and colorless syringe.

I screamed in frustration as I realized that the restraints placed over my arms wouldn't budge, and then out of desperation I even tried to bite the man on his back; in return he almost knocked me out using his right elbow.

"What's that? Can you not leave your chocolate wrappers lying around everywhere? If you keep this up, I'll revoke your TV privileges for a week!" The doctor's voice seemed much more relaxed now compared to earlier. After injecting me with that weird substance, he went right back to talking to his daughter, who was present there.

"Help me, please! I don't want to sleep. I don't want to see that nightmare again." Was all I could say before passing out, tears scrolling down my face as I desperately tried my best to fight the sudden urge to sleep.

This time, I didn't dream about anything. I was simply standing in pure darkness alone with my thoughts until my body began to reawaken.

Strangely enough, I felt calmer than ever; all my worries had washed away enough for me to care about the conversation going between my benefactor and his daughter.

"Yeah, I know, I know. But the holidays just started; I have plenty of time to do my homework; I can always do them later; now get out! You're in the way."

The young girl was a lot bolder than I originally imagined, or was her father a lot less strict about her than mine?

"Okay, but don't you think it's a waste spending the rest of the day holed up in this room? Plus, it's such a beautiful day outside; why don't you go and play with—" That was a kind of discussion I was all too familiar with. I was giggling inside thinking of how annoyed that little girl was right now.

"Don't wanna!" She protested as she threw herself at a plastic chair nearby.

"But…" Her father approached her slowly, getting on his knee to ease her into following his suggestion, but she remained resolute.

"Don't wanna!"

Ultimately, the doctor gave up. After a resigned sigh, he simply got out of the room in silence, leaving the child sitting next to me watching the television.

Not long after, she got tired of sitting on her chair and began nuzzling me away in order to make room for herself. She snuck inside the bedsheets and crossed her bare frozen legs with mine.

"Why are your legs so cold? Damn, you're freezing me." I complained while trying to move my legs away.

"Whoa! You're awake? Since when?" She seemed startled by my sudden exclamation to the point she almost jumped out of the bed.

"I just woke up; now get off; you're freezing me."

"The whole house is freezing! It's winter outside! You should be thankful we turned on the heaters so that your room is hot enough to not notice it." She snapped back at me, hugging my left arm.

On the screen there was a documentary about lions, showing their hunting skills and powers; it was the kind of animal I had never seen before, but it was cute enough to want as a pet, plus it had a cool mane made out of fire.

The males had the fiery mane, while the females had none. They hunted in large packs consistently, mostly of other females; every pack had very few males and at least six to seven females.

"Do you want some chocolate?" 

What? Didn't she just get scolded for eating chocolate in my room? Why would you keep eating it if it gets you in trouble?

"Is there something else we can watch? Maybe a movie or something with a little more action?" I asked her.

"You don't like lions?" She asked me while handing me a handful of chocolate snacks.

"I don't hate them." I responded as I turned back to look at the screen.

"They're not that cool; they don't have that… that spark, that thing that makes you cool. I expected to see lots more blood and fights, but they look too calm." I added after a couple more minutes of watching a boring expert trying to explain how they socialized their cubs.

"I don't like seeing violent stuff on television." The girl argued back.

That doesn't make any sense! Are animals in the wild less violent? They'll be ripping each other apart, feasting on the carcasses. Do you really like lions that much? Why? They're just large cats with bigger bodies than normal.

"Land animals are boring; if you want to see something interesting, you should look underwater instead. Down there are plenty of weird creatures; some have glowing bodies, some are see-through, some can only live in the deepest and darkest places, and some are big and violent enough to easily wreck even an armored ship."

The girl simply scoffed at my enthusiastic explanation and hid the remote as I was still speaking.

"No, I don't like whales and sharks." She said so before I could resume my explanation.

"Sharks and whales aren't the only beings that live in the sea; there are actually a lot of different kinds of creatures you can find there."

"But they're so mean-looking! I saw lots of films where they just keep eating people, no matter how much they plead for mercy!" I could see the fire in her eyes; no matter what, she was unwilling to let me win the argument.

That statement felt somewhat silly. I chuckled a bit at her ridiculous belief and then promptly corrected her.

"How many sharks have you seen in your life?"

"Zero, I've never been to the surface, but my father just got his permit approved, so in a couple of years we'll be able to start living on the surface." 

"Ah, figures. Well, sharks aren't that common to see; even I only saw a handful of them, and they're a lot more chill than you would think. Some of them are even harmless. Like, even if they bumped into you, I doubt their bites could tear off a limb." For the first time I saw that determination wavering; she didn't know where to look, so I waited eagerly for her to answer so that I could debunk her arguments.

"Elena."

I called her by her name because she looked distracted while fidgeting with her arms behind her back.

"How do you know my name? Can you read minds?"

Her flustered face was cute to look at; her chubby cheeks stuffed with chocolate made her look like a hamster.

How boring! I'm dying of boredom here, please! Tell me you have something fun to do here; otherwise, I might just go crazy!

"No, no, I just heard your father call you by that name. Do you have anything to play with? What kind of video games do you have?" I asked, and the troubled look in her eyes vanished, and she was gleaming with joy. The proud smile on her face irritated me.

"Wait, can you repeat what you just said? I wasn't listening." She asked me while resting her head over my chest.

Oi! Don't get too comfortable here. I'm thankful you saved me, but don't get carried away; I can still kill you if I say the wrong thing to my mother.

"Do-you-have-some-games? Do you play video games?" I asked her.

Her puzzled look left me in shock.

Do the people of the fracture not know what a video game is? What kind of life have they lived up until now?

I didn't know how to explain without sounding like a total nerd or like a brag on my part.

"Ah, I got it! That expensive stuff you buy for the television, I never had that. Dad says it makes your brain rot."

She then raised her head and untangled her legs from mine to sit with her legs crossed, pointing her right index finger at me, in a lecturing pose I was all too familiar with.

Don't point at me.

"That's not true! They're just a way to pass time and relax." I immediately argued back, sitting up and pushing the finger away from me.

"They're brainwashing you!" She shouted in return.

"Again, that's not true! They're just like movies; they're nice to look at and enjoyable when you want to relax and do nothing for a while."

"They're brainwashing you!" She simply wouldn't allow me to put up more than a few sentences together and kept interrupting me until I finally gave up.

"Fine, you're right, video games are evil." I gave up.

"See! It wasn't too easy to admit it!" She said with a proud look on her face, a smile from ear to ear, and standing on the bed looking down on me with an annoying fake laugh to mock me.

"You didn't even give me—"

"Ah-ah-ah! You said it, video games are evil! No taking back now!"

The satisfied, smug look on her face irritated me to no end, but then everything faded away when I gulped down a piece of chocolate she handed me.

It had a strange texture; I expected it to be rather crunchy, but it quickly turned soft and malleable, with a strong metallic flavor. That sensation brought bad feelings into my mind and made my body shiver uncontrollably, yet I couldn't quite pinpoint why I was feeling that way.

"Are you okay? Was the chocolate not to your liking? Here, spit it out if you don't feel like eating it!" The girl hurriedly took out a handkerchief from a pocket on her right side and offered it to me. 

After I spit out the chocolate snack, I looked back on it to see if the color or texture had changed, and it hadn't.

 What? But I was sure it tasted different… What's going on?

"Are you okay? You're scaring me. Is there something odd with the small chocolate?"

"No, no, it's fine; everything's fine; I just don't feel all that hungry." I replied to calm her down, since she started to panic.

I slapped myself in the cheeks a couple of times to stop the shivering of my body and then gave her a thumbs up. She was still extremely worried, but that at the very least had stopped her from calling her father back.